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Letters from Hernan Cortes

Historia Verdadera

Cortes Describes Tenochtitlan

From Cortés, Second Letter, 110–14

In order, most potent Sire, to convey to your Majesty a just conception of the great extent of this noble city of Tenochtitlan, and of the many rare and wonderful objects it contains, of the government and dominions of Moctezuma, the sovereign; of the religious rites and customs that prevail, and the order that exists in this as well as other cities appertaining to his realm: it would require the labor of many accomplished writers, and much time for the completion of the task. I shall not be able to relate an hundredth part of what could be told respecting these matters but I will endeavor to describe, in the best manner in my power, what I have myself seen; and imperfectly as I may succeed in the attempt, I am fully aware that the account will appear so wonderful as to be deemed scarcely worthy of credit; since even when we who have seen these things with our own eyes, are yet so amazed as to be unable to comprehend their reality. But your Majesty may be assured that if there is any fault in my relation, either in regard to the present subject, or to any other matters of which I shall give your Majesty an account, it will arise from too great brevity rather than extravagance or prolixity in the details; and it seems to me but just to my Prince and Sovereign to declare the truth in the clearest manner, without saying any thing that would detract from it, or add to it.

Before I beam to describe this great city and the others already mentioned, it may be well for the better understanding of the subject to say something of the con�guration of Mexico, in which they are situated, it being the principal seat of Moctezuma's power. This Province is in the form of a circle, surrounded on all sides by lo�y and rugged mountains'; its level surface comprises an area of about seventy leagues in circumference, including two lakes, that overspread nearly the whole valley, being navigated by boats more than ��y leagues round. One of these lakes contains fresh, and the other, which is the larger of the two, salt water. On one side of the lakes, in the middle of the valley, a range of highlands divides them from one another, with the exception of a narrow strait which lies between the highlands and the lo�y sierras. This strait is a bow-shot wide, and connects the two lakes; and by this means a trade is carried on between the cities and other settlements on the lakes in canoes without the necessity of traveling by land. As the salt lake rises and falls with its tides like the sea, during the time of high water it pours into the other lake with the rapidity of a powerful stream; and on the other hand, when the tide has ebbed, the water runs from the fresh into the salt lake.

This great city of Tenochtitlan [Mexico] is situated in this salt lake, and from the main land to the denser parts of it, by whichever route one chooses to enter, the distance is two leagues. There are four avenues or entrances to the city, all of which are formed by arti�cial causeways, two spears' length in width. The city is as large as Seville or Cordova; its streets, I speak of the principal ones, are very wide and straight; some of these, and all the inferior ones, are half land and half water, and are navigated by canoes. All the streets at intervals have openings, through which the water �ows, crossing from one street to another; and at these openings, some of which are very wide, there are also very wide bridges, composed of large pieces of timber, of great strength and well put together; on many of these bridges ten horses can go abreast. Foreseeing that if the inhabitants of this city should prove treacherous, they would possess great advantages from the manner in which the city is constructed, since by removing the bridges at the entrances, and abandoning the place, they could leave us to perish by famine without our being able to reach the main land–as soon as I had entered it, I made

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great haste to build four brigantines, which were soon �nished, and were large enough to take ashore three hundred men and the horses, whenever it should become necessary.

This city has many public squares, in which are situated the markets and other places for buying and selling. There is one square twice as large as that of the city of Salamanca, surrounded by porticoes, where are daily assembled more than sixty thousand souls, engaged in buying, and selling; and where are found all kinds of merchandise that the world a�ords, embracing the necessaries of life, as for instance articles of food, as well as jewels of gold and silver, lead, brass, copper, tin, precious stones, bones, shells, snails, and feathers. There are also exposed for sale wrought and unwrought stone, bricks burnt and unburnt, timber hewn and unhewn, of di�erent sorts. There is a street for game, where every variety of' birds found in the country are sold, as fowls, partridges, quails, wild ducks, �y-catchers, widgeons, turtle-doves, pigeons, reedbirds, parrots, sparrows, eagles, hawks, owls, and kestrels they sell likewise the skins of some birds of prey, with their feathers, head, beak, and claws. There are also sold rabbits, hares, deer, and little dogs, which are raised for eating and castrated. There is also an herb street, where may be obtained all sorts of roots and medicinal herbs that the country a�ords. There are apothecaries' shops, where prepared medicines, liquids, ointments, and plasters are sold; barbers' shops, where they wash and shave the head; and restaurateurs, that furnish food and drink at a certain price. There is also a class of men like those called in Castile porters, for carrying burdens. Wood and coals are seen in abundance, and braziers of earthenware for burning coals; mats of various kinds for beds, others of a lighter sort for seats, and for balls and bedrooms. There are all kinds of green vegetables, especially onions, leeks, garlic, watercresses, nasturtium, borage, sorrel, artichokes, and golden thistle; fruits also of numerous descriptions, amongst which are cherries and plums, similar to those in Spain; honey and wax from bees, and from the stalks of maize, which are as sweet as the sugar-cane; honey is also extracted from the plant called maguey, which is superior to sweet or new wine; from the same plant they extract sugar and wine, which they also sell. Di�erent kinds of cotton thread of all colors in skeins are exposed for sale in one quarter of the market, which has the appearance of the silk-market at Granada, although the former is supplied more abundantly. Painters' colors, as numerous as can be found in Spain, and as �ne shades; deerskins dressed and undressed, dyed di�erent colors; earthenware of a large size and excellent quality; large and small jars, jugs, pots, bricks, and an endless variety of vessels, all made of �ne clay, and all or most of them glazed and painted; maize, or Indian corn, in the grain and in the form of bread, preferred in the grain for its �avor to that of the other islands and terra-�rma; pâtés of birds and �sh; great quantities of �sh, fresh, salt, cooked and uncooked ; the eggs of hens, geese, and of all the other birds I have mentioned, in great abundance, and cakes made of eggs; �nally, every thing that can be found throughout the whole country is sold in the markets, comprising articles so numerous that to avoid prolixity and because their names are not retained in my memory, or are unknown to me, I shall not attempt to enumerate them. Every kind of merchandise is sold in a particular street or quarter assigned to it exclusively, and this is the best order is preserved. They sell every thing by number or measure; at least so far we have not observed them to sell any thing by weight. There is a building in the great square that is used as an audience house, where ten or twelve persons, who are magistrates, sit and decide all controversies that arise in the market, and order delinquents to be punished. In the same square there are other persons who go constantly about among the people observing what is sold, and the measures used in selling; and they have been seen to break measures that were not true.

Columbus’ Confusion About the New World

The European discovery of America opened possibilities for those

with eyes to see. But Columbus was not one of them

Edmund S. Morgan

October 2009

Christopher Columbus carried ideas that boded ill for Indies natives. The Gallery Collection / Corbis

In the year 1513, a group of men led by Vasco Núñez de Balboa marched across the

Isthmus of Panama and discovered the Paci�c Ocean. They had been looking for it—they

      ⎙ ✉

TRAVEL

knew it existed—and, familiar as they were with oceans, they had no di�culty in

recognizing it when they saw it. On their way, however, they saw a good many things

they had not been looking for and were not familiar with. When they returned to Spain

to tell what they had seen, it was not a simple matter to �nd words for everything.

For example, they had killed a large and ferocious wild animal. They called it a tiger,

although there were no tigers in Spain and none of the men had ever seen one before.

Listening to their story was Peter Martyr, member of the King's Council of the Indies and

possessor of an insatiable curiosity about the new land that Spain was uncovering in the

west. How, the learned man asked them, did they know that the ferocious animal was a

tiger? They answered "that they knewe it by the spottes, �ercenesse, agilitie, and such

other markes and tokens whereby auncient writers have described the Tyger." It was a

good answer. Men, confronted with things they do not recognize, turn to the writings of

those who have had a wider experience. And in 1513 it was still assumed that the

ancient writers had had a wider experience than those who came after them.

Columbus himself had made that assumption. His discoveries posed for him, as for

others, a problem of identi�cation. It seemed to be a question not so much of giving

names to new lands as of �nding the proper old names, and the same was true of the

things that the new lands contained. Cruising through the Caribbean, enchanted by the

beauty and variety of what he saw, Columbus assumed that the strange plants and trees

were strange only because he was insu�ciently versed in the writings of men who did

know them. "I am the saddest man in the world," he wrote, "because I do not recognize

them."

We need not deride Columbus' reluctance to give up the world that he knew from books.

Only idiots escape entirely from the world that the past bequeaths. The discovery of

America opened a new world, full of new things and new possibilities for those with eyes

to see them. But the New World did not erase the Old. Rather, the Old World

determined what men saw in the New and what they did with it. What America became

after 1492 depended both on what men found there and on what they expected to �nd,

both on what America actually was and on what old writers and old experience led men

to think it was, or ought to be or could be made to be.

During the decade before 1492, as Columbus nursed a growing urge to sail west to the

Indies—as the lands of China, Japan and India were then known in Europe—he was

studying the old writers to �nd out what the world and its people were like. He read the

Ymago Mundi of Pierre d'Ailly, a French cardinal who wrote in the early 15th century, the

travels of Marco Polo and of Sir John Mandeville, Pliny's Natural History and the Historia

Rerum Ubique Gestarum of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II). Columbus was not a

scholarly man. Yet he studied these books, made hundreds of marginal notations in

them and came out with ideas about the world that were characteristically simple and

strong and sometimes wrong, the kind of ideas that the self-educated person gains from

independent reading and clings to in de�ance of what anyone else tries to tell him.

The strongest one was a wrong one—namely, that the distance between Europe and the

eastern shore of Asia was short, indeed, that Spain was closer to China westward than

eastward. Columbus never abandoned this conviction. And before he set out to prove it

by sailing west from Spain, he studied his books to �nd out all he could about the lands

that he would be visiting. From Marco Polo he learned that the Indies were rich in gold,

silver, pearls, jewels and spices. The Great Khan, whose empire stretched from the Arctic

to the Indian Ocean, had displayed to Polo a wealth and majesty that dwarfed the

splendors of the courts of Europe.

ort is d

Polo also had things to say about the ordinary people of the Far East. Those in the

province of Mangi, where they grew ginger, were averse to war and so had fallen an easy

prey to the khan. On Nangama, an island o� the coast, described as having "great

plentie of spices," the people were far from averse to war: they were anthropophagi—

man-eaters—who devoured their captives. There were, in fact, man-eating people in

several of the o�shore islands, and in many islands both men and women dressed

themselves with only a small scrap of cloth over their genitals. On the island of Discorsia,

in spite of the fact that they made �ne cotton cloth, the people went entirely naked. In

one place there were two islands where men and women were segregated, the women

on one island, the men on the other.

Marco Polo occasionally slipped into fables like this last one, but most of what he had to

say about the Indies was the result of actual observation. Sir John Mandeville's travels,

on the other hand, were a hoax—there was no such man—and the places he claimed to

have visited in the 1300s were fantastically �lled with one-eyed men and one-footed

men, dog-faced men and men with two faces or no faces. But the author of the hoax did

draw on the reports of enough genuine travelers to make some of his stories plausible,

and he also drew on a legend as old as human dreams, the legend of a golden age when

men were good. He told of an island where the people lived without malice or guile,

without covetousness or lechery or gluttony, wishing for none of the riches of this world.

They were not Christians, but they lived by the golden rule. A man who planned to see

the Indies for himself could hardly fail to be stirred by the thought of �nding such a

people.

Columbus surely expected to bring back some of the gold that was supposed to be so

plentiful. The spice trade was one of the most lucrative in Europe, and he expected to

bring back spices. But what did he propose to do about the people in possession of

these treasures?

When he set out, he carried with him a commission from the king and queen of Spain,

empowering him "to discover and acquire certain islands and mainland in the ocean

sea" and to be "Admiral and Viceroy and Governor therein." If the king and Columbus

expected to assume dominion over any of the Indies or other lands en route, they must

have had some ideas, not only about the Indies but also about themselves, to warrant

the expectation. What had they to o�er that would make their dominion welcome? Or if

they proposed to impose their rule by force, how could they justify such a step, let alone

carry it out? The answer is that they had two things: they had Christianity and they had

civilization.

Christianity has meant many things to many men, and its role in the European conquest

and occupation of America was varied. But in 1492 to Columbus there was probably

nothing very complicated about it. He would have reduced it to a matter of corrupt

human beings, destined for eternal damnation, redeemed by a merciful savior. Christ

saved those who believed in him, and it was the duty of Christians to spread his gospel

and thus rescue the heathens from the fate that would otherwise await them.

ort is d

Although Christianity was in itself a su�cient justi�cation for dominion, Columbus would

also carry civilization to the Indies; and this, too, was a gift that he and his

contemporaries considered adequate recompense for anything they might take. When

people talked about civilization—or civility, as they usually called it—they seldom

speci�ed precisely what they meant. Civility was closely associated with Christianity, but

the two were not identical. Whereas Christianity was always accompanied by civility, the

Greeks and Romans had had civility without Christianity. One way to de�ne civility was

by its opposite, barbarism. Originally the word "barbarian" had simply meant

"foreigner"—to a Greek someone who was not Greek, to a Roman someone who was not

Roman. By the 15th or 16th century, it meant someone not only foreign but with

manners and customs of which civil persons disapproved. North Africa became known

as Barbary, a 16th-century geographer explained, "because the people be barbarous,

not onely in language, but in manners and customs." Parts of the Indies, from Marco

Polo's description, had to be civil, but other parts were obviously barbarous: for

example, the lands where people went naked. Whatever civility meant, it meant clothes.

But there was a little more to it than that, and there still is. Civil people distinguished

themselves by the pains they took to order their lives. They organized their society to

produce the elaborate food, clothing, buildings and other equipment characteristic of

their manner of living. They had strong governments to protect property, to protect

good persons from evil ones, to protect the manners and customs that di�erentiated

civil people from barbarians. The superior clothing, housing, food and protection that

attached to civilization made it seem to the European a gift worth giving to the ill-

clothed, ill-housed and ungoverned barbarians of the world.

Slavery was an ancient instrument of civilization, and in the 15th century it had been

revived as a way to deal with barbarians who refused to accept Christianity and the rule

of civilized government. Through slavery they could be made to abandon their bad

habits, put on clothes and reward their instructors with a lifetime of work. Throughout

the 15th century, as the Portuguese explored the coast of Africa, large numbers of well-

clothed sea captains brought civilization to naked savages by carrying them o� to the

slave markets of Seville and Lisbon.

Since Columbus had lived in Lisbon and sailed in Portuguese vessels to the Gold Coast of

Africa, he was not unfamiliar with barbarians. He had seen for himself that the Torrid

Zone could support human life, and he had observed how pleased barbarians were with

trinkets on which civilized Europeans set small value, such as the little bells that

falconers placed on hawks. Before setting o� on his voyage, he laid in a store of hawk's

bells. If the barbarous people he expected to �nd in the Indies should think civilization

and Christianity an insu�cient reward for submission to Spain, perhaps hawk's bells

would help.

Columbus sailed from Palos de la Frontera on Friday, August 3, 1492, reached the

Canary Islands six days later and stayed there for a month to �nish out�tting his ships.

He left on September 6, and �ve weeks later, in about the place he expected, he found

the Indies. What else could it be but the Indies? There on the shore were the naked

people. With hawk's bells and beads he made their acquaintance and found some of

them wearing gold nose plugs. It all added up. He had found the Indies. And not only

that. He had found a land over which he would have no di�culty in establishing Spanish

dominion, for the people showed him an immediate veneration. He had been there only

two days, coasting along the shores of the islands, when he was able to hear the natives

crying in loud voices, "Come and see the men who have come from heaven; bring them

food and drink." If Columbus thought he was able to translate the language in two days'

time, it is not surprising that what he heard in it was what he wanted to hear or that

what he saw was what he wanted to see—namely, the Indies, �lled with people eager to

submit to their new admiral and viceroy.

Columbus made four voyages to America, during which he explored an astonishingly

large area of the Caribbean and a part of the northern coast of South America. At every

island the �rst thing he inquired about was gold, taking heart from every trace of it he

found. And at Haiti he found enough to convince him that this was Ophir, the country to

which Solomon and Jehosophat had sent for gold and silver. Since its lush vegetation

reminded him of Castile, he renamed it Española, the Spanish island, which was later

Latinized as Hispaniola.

Española appealed to Columbus from his �rst glimpse of it. From aboard ship it was

possible to make out rich �elds waving with grass. There were good harbors, lovely sand

beaches and fruit-laden trees. The people were shy and �ed whenever the caravels

approached the shore, but Columbus gave orders "that they should take some, treat

them well and make them lose their fear, that some gain might be made, since,

considering the beauty of the land, it could not be but that there was gain to be got."

And indeed there was. Although the amount of gold worn by the natives was even less

than the amount of clothing, it gradually became apparent that there was gold to be

had. One man possessed some that had been pounded into gold leaf. Another appeared

with a gold belt. Some produced nuggets for the admiral. Española accordingly became

the �rst European colony in America. Although Columbus had formally taken possession

of every island he found, the act was mere ritual until he reached Española. Here he

began the European occupation of the New World, and here his European ideas and

attitudes began their transformation of land and people.

The Arawak Indians of Española were the handsomest people that Columbus had

encountered in the New World and so attractive in character that he found it hard to

praise them enough. "They are the best people in the world," he said, "and beyond all

the mildest." They cultivated a bit of cassava for bread and made a bit of cottonlike cloth

from the �bers of the gossampine tree. But they spent most of the day like children

idling away their time from morning to night, seemingly without a care in the world.

Once they saw that Columbus meant them no harm, they outdid one another in bringing

him anything he wanted. It was impossible to believe, he reported, "that anyone has

seen a people with such kind hearts and so ready to give the Christians all that they

possess, and when the Christians arrive, they run at once to bring them everything."

To Columbus the Arawaks seemed like relics of the golden age. On the basis of what he

told Peter Martyr, who recorded his voyages, Martyr wrote, "they seeme to live in that

golden worlde of the which olde writers speake so much, wherein menne lived simply

and innocently without enforcement of lawes, without quarreling, judges and libelles,

content onely to satis�e nature, without further vexation for knowledge of things to

come."

As the idyllic Arawaks conformed to one ancient picture, their enemies the Caribs

conformed to another that Columbus had read of, the anthropophagi. According to the

Arawaks, the Caribs, or Cannibals, were man-eaters, and as such their name eventually

entered the English language. (This was at best a misrepresentation, which Columbus

would soon exploit.) The Caribs lived on islands of their own and met every European

approach with poisoned arrows, which men and women together �red in showers. They

were not only �erce but, by comparison with the Arawaks, also seemed more energetic,

more industrious and, it might even be said, sadly enough, more civil. After Columbus

succeeded in entering one of their settlements on his second voyage, a member of the

expedition reported, "This people seemed to us to be more civil than those who were in

the other islands we have visited, although they all have dwellings of straw, but these

have them better made and better provided with supplies, and in them were more signs

of industry."

Columbus had no doubts about how to proceed, either with the lovable but lazy Arawaks

or with the hateful but industrious Caribs. He had come to take possession and to

establish dominion. In almost the same breath, he described the Arawaks' gentleness

and innocence and then went on to assure the king and queen of Spain, "They have no

arms and are all naked and without any knowledge of war, and very cowardly, so that a

thousand of them would not face three. And they are also �tted to be ruled and to be set

to work, to cultivate the land and to do all else that may be necessary, and you may build

towns and teach them to go clothed and adopt our customs."

So much for the golden age. Columbus had not yet prescribed the method by which the

Arawaks would be set to work, but he had a pretty clear idea of how to handle the

Caribs. On his second voyage, after capturing a few of them, he sent them in slavery to

Spain, as samples of what he hoped would be a regular trade. They were obviously

intelligent, and in Spain they might "be led to abandon that inhuman custom which they

have of eating men, and there in Castile, learning the language, they will much more

readily receive baptism and secure the welfare of their souls." The way to handle the

slave trade, Columbus suggested, was to send ships from Spain loaded with cattle (there

were no native domestic animals on Española), and he would return the ships loaded

with supposed Cannibals. This plan was never put into operation, partly because the

Spanish sovereigns did not approve it and partly because the Cannibals did not approve

it. They defended themselves so well with their poisoned arrows that the Spaniards

decided to withhold the blessings of civilization from them and to concentrate their

e�orts on the seemingly more amenable Arawaks.

The process of civilizing the Arawaks got underway in earnest after the Santa Maria ran

aground on Christmas Day, 1492, o� Caracol Bay. The local leader in that part of

Española, Guacanagari, rushed to the scene and with his people helped the Spaniards to

salvage everything aboard. Once again Columbus was overjoyed with the remarkable

natives. They are, he wrote, "so full of love and without greed, and suitable for every

purpose, that I assure your Highnesses that I believe there is no better land in the world,

and they are always smiling." While the salvage operations were going on, canoes full of

Arawaks from other parts of the island came in bearing gold. Guacanagari "was greatly

delighted to see the admiral joyful and understood that he desired much gold."

Thereafter it arrived in amounts calculated to console the admiral for the loss of the

Santa Maria, which had to be scuttled. He decided to make his permanent headquarters

on the spot and accordingly ordered a fortress to be built, with a tower and a large

moat.

What followed is a long, complicated and unpleasant story. Columbus returned to Spain

to bring the news of his discoveries. The Spanish monarchs were less impressed than he

with what he had found, but he was able to round up a large expedition of Spanish

colonists to return with him and help exploit the riches of the Indies. At Española the

new settlers built forts and towns and began helping themselves to all the gold they

could �nd among the natives. These creatures of the golden age remained generous.

But precisely because they did not value possessions, they had little to turn over. When

gold was not forthcoming, the Europeans began killing. Some of the natives struck back

and hid out in the hills. But in 1495 a punitive expedition rounded up 1,500 of them, and

500 were shipped o� to the slave markets of Seville.

The natives, seeing what was in store for them, dug up their own crops of cassava and

destroyed their supplies in hopes that the resulting famine would drive the Spaniards

out. But it did not work. The Spaniards were sure there was more gold in the island than

the natives had yet found, and were determined to make them dig it out. Columbus built

more forts throughout the island and decreed that every Arawak of 14 years or over was

to furnish a hawk's bell full of gold dust every three months. The various local leaders

were made responsible for seeing that the tribute was paid. In regions where gold was

not to be had, 25 pounds of woven or spun cotton could be substituted for the hawk's

bell of gold dust.

Unfortunately Española was not Ophir, and it did not have anything like the amount of

gold that Columbus thought it did. The pieces that the natives had at �rst presented him

were the accumulation of many years. To �ll their quotas by washing in the riverbeds

was all but impossible, even with continual daily labor. But the demand was unrelenting,

and those who sought to escape it by �eeing to the mountains were hunted down with

dogs taught to kill. A few years later Peter Martyr was able to report that the natives

"beare this yoke of servitude with an evill will, but yet they beare it."

The tribute system, for all its injustice and cruelty, preserved something of the Arawaks'

old social arrangements: they retained their old leaders under control of the king's

viceroy, and royal directions to the viceroy might ultimately have worked some

mitigation of their hardships. But the Spanish settlers of Española did not care for this

centralized method of exploitation. They wanted a share of the land and its people, and

when their demands were not met they revolted against the government of Columbus.

In 1499 they forced him to abandon the system of obtaining tribute through the Arawak

chieftains for a new one in which both land and people were turned over to individual

Spaniards for exploitation as they saw �t. This was the beginning of the system of

repartimientos or encomiendas later extended to other areas of Spanish occupation. With

its inauguration, Columbus' economic control of Española e�ectively ceased, and even

his political authority was revoked later in the same year when the king appointed a new

governor.

For the Arawaks the new system of forced labor meant that they did more work, wore

more clothes and said more prayers. Peter Martyr could rejoice that "so many

thousands of men are received to bee the sheepe of Christes �ocke." But these were

sheep prepared for slaughter. If we may believe Bartolomé de Las Casas, a Dominican

priest who spent many years among them, they were tortured, burned and fed to the

dogs by their masters. They died from overwork and from new European diseases. They

killed themselves. And they took pains to avoid having children. Life was not �t to live,

and they stopped living. From a population of 100,000 at the lowest estimate in 1492,

there remained in 1514 about 32,000 Arawaks in Española. By 1542, according to Las

Casas, only 200 were left. In their place had appeared slaves imported from Africa. The

people of the golden age had been virtually exterminated.

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Why? What is the meaning of this tale of horror? Why is the �rst chapter of American

history an atrocity story? Bartolomé de Las Casas had a simple answer, greed: "The

cause why the Spanishe have destroyed such an in�nitie of soules, hath been onely, that

they have helde it for their last scope and marke to gette golde." The answer is true

enough. But we shall have to go further than Spanish greed to understand why

American history began this way. The Spanish had no monopoly on greed.

The Indians' austere way of life could not fail to win the admiration of the invaders, for

self-denial was an ancient virtue in Western culture. The Greeks and Romans had

constructed philosophies and the Christians a religion around it. The Indians, and

especially the Arawaks, gave no sign of thinking much about God, but otherwise they

seemed to have attained the monastic virtues. Plato had emphasized again and again

that freedom was to be reached by restraining one's needs, and the Arawaks had

attained impressive freedom.

But even as the Europeans admired the Indians' simplicity, they were troubled by it,

troubled and o�ended. Innocence never fails to o�end, never fails to invite attack, and

the Indians seemed the most innocent people anyone had ever seen. Without the help

of Christianity or of civilization, they had attained virtues that Europeans liked to think of

as the proper outcome of Christianity and civilization. The fury with which the Spaniards

assaulted the Arawaks even after they had enslaved them must surely have been in part

a blind impulse to crush an innocence that seemed to deny the Europeans' cherished

assumption of their own civilized, Christian superiority over naked, heathen barbarians.

That the Indians were destroyed by Spanish greed is true. But greed is simply one of the

uglier names we give to the driving force of modern civilization. We usually prefer less

pejorative names for it. Call it the pro�t motive, or free enterprise, or the work ethic, or

the American way, or, as the Spanish did, civility. Before we become too outraged at the

behavior of Columbus and his followers, before we identify ourselves too easily with the

lovable Arawaks, we have to ask whether we could really get along without greed and

everything that goes with it. Yes, a few of us, a few eccentrics, might manage to live for a

time like the Arawaks. But the modern world could not have put up with the Arawaks

any more than the Spanish could. The story moves us, o�ends us, but perhaps the more

so because we have to recognize ourselves not in the Arawaks but in Columbus and his

followers.

The Spanish reaction to the Arawaks was Western civilization's reaction to the barbarian:

the Arawaks answered the Europeans' description of men, just as Balboa's tiger

answered the description of a tiger, and being men they had to be made to live as men

were supposed to live. But the Arawaks' view of man was something di�erent. They died

not merely from cruelty, torture, murder and disease, but also, in the last analysis,

because they could not be persuaded to �t the European conception of what they ought

to be.

Edmund S. Morgan is a Sterling Professor emeritus at Yale University.

1 / 2

Bartolomé de Las Casas lamented that "the Spanishe have destroyed such an infinitie of soules" in their search for gold. North Wind Picture Archives / Alamy

2 / 2

Christopher Columbus carried ideas that boded ill for Indies natives. The Gallery Collection / Corbis

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31 Years of NAGPRA: Evaluating the Restitution of Native American

Ancestral Remains and Belongings

May 18, 2021

By Christopher Zheng.

Whether it is land stolen under coercive treaties or looted belongings displayed in museums, the United States’ relationship with Native

American tribes has long been defined by bad faith. In July of last year, however, the Supreme Court took a step towards reckoning a long

history of injustice by honoring a treaty with the Muscogee Nation, formally recognizing half of the land in Oklahoma as tribal land. This, along

with recent calls to reexamine mascots, flags, and statues depicting Indigenous peoples, demonstrates a shift towards respecting the

limited sovereignty of tribal governments and, by extension, their cultural footprint in modern America.

However, much work beyond awareness needs to be done. Many of the Native American belongings sitting inside museums and galleries

today were improperly acquired. Much of this is due to the fact that, after the Civil War, the American government funded scientists and

anthropologists to collect millions of Native religious and cultural items and ancestral remains, which were often taken from tribes by fraud,

compulsion, or robbery. Additionally, tribes have long found little legal protection for preserving their cultural land and practices. In 1988, for

instance, the Supreme Court in Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protection Association held that the American Indian Religious Freedom

Act (“AIRFA”) could not prevent a logging company from building a road through an area used for native religious rites. In response to Lyng

and its profound implications on tribal sovereignty, Congress passed a bill two years later aimed at guaranteeing communication between the

federal government and tribes for the protection and repatriation of Native cultural heritage belongings and ancestral remains. This article

seeks to explore how effective that law has been in achieving that goal.

The Native American Graves and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA)

Thirty one years ago, on November 16th, 1990, President George H.W. Bush signed the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act

(“NAGPRA”) into law. The act established procedures for the restitution of Native American remains and funerary belongings to their

Back

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affiliated tribes or lineal descendants, as enforced by civil and criminal penalties. Under NAGPRA, museums and federal agencies are

required to inventory Native American remains and funerary objects, create summaries of cultural items, consult with lineal descendants or

associated tribes, evaluate repatriation requests for cultural items, and provide public notice prior to repatriation or transfer of such ancestral

remains and objects. Additionally, the statute establishes a permit requirement for any person who wishes to excavate human remains,

funerary or sacred objects, or objects of cultural patrimony from federal or tribal lands. Such permits are conditioned upon approval by

interested tribes and compliance with the Archeological Resources Protection Act (“APRA”). In the event that an individual recovers cultural

belongings or remains on federal land or tribal property, NAGPRA requires that the relevant federal agency official or Indian tribe official

overseeing the area should be immediately notified. Such officials should then quickly take steps to protect the objects, alert interested

lineal descendants and tribes, and ensure that excavation is carried out properly. Additionally, if the belongings or remains are found as part

of a mining or construction project, all activity must cease and reasonable efforts must be made to secure the objects before the project may

continue. The rules for cultural objects found on private or state land depend on who has control of the items once they enter a private

holding or collection. For the most part, private collections of Native American remains are untouched by NAGPRA. However, the 10th

Circuit has previously ruled that NAGPRA extends to the individual trade of Native American belongings.

Perhaps the most important takeaway from NAGPRA is its vesting of custody, ownership, and control of Native belongings and remains in

lineal descendants or, if such individuals cannot be ascertained, the tribes that originally occupied the land on which the objects were found.

Putting this provision into practice, however, has not been without difficulty. The most well-known controversy involved a 9,000-year-old

skeleton discovered along the Columbia River in Kennewick, Washington in 1996. Dubbed by Native Americans as “the Ancient One,” the

remains were claimed by nearby Indian tribes who asserted lineal connections based on oral histories about their indigenous ancestors, and

the Army Corp of Engineers agreed to repatriate the remains per NAGPRA. However, a group of eight scientists, some of whom worked for

the Smithsonian Museum, filed suit to block the transfer of the skeleton, asserting that §3001(9) of the statute required a relationship with

presently existing tribes, peoples, or cultures and that the absence of evidence of a direct link between the modern tribes and the ancient

remains made NAGPRA’s requirements irrelevant. The 9th Circuit in 2004 agreed with the scientists, holding that “no reasonable person

could conclude on this record that Kennewick Man is ‘Native American’ under NAGPRA.” A decade after the decision, a DNA analysis

performed on the skeletal remains found that the Kennewick Man was, in fact, closely linked with the contemporary Colville tribe, and the

remains were turned over to a tribal coalition. In 2017, the Colville reburied the Kennewick Man in a final secret resting place. Cases such

as this suggest that increased accessibility to technology in anthropological study may aid in the efficient repatriation of Indigenous remains

and belongings, though this technique must be balanced against the significant problem that most tribes do not want their ancestors to

undergo intrusive testing.

Challenges to NAGPRA Enforcement

While much progress has been made in the statute’s thirty-one-year-old history, many obstacles to the return of cultural belongings still

abound, resulting in a glacial pace for the repatriation process. In fact, of the 185,475 sets of human remains inventoried within the most

current NAGPRA report (the majority of such inventories being incomplete), it would take about 238 years to repatriate all listed remains at the

current rate, not even accounting for any associated belongings. This section will discuss four of the main challenges facing NAGPRA

enforcement: communication difficulties, statutory ambiguity, the international loophole, and ethical concerns.

Communication Difficulties

One of the largest barriers to the efficacy of NAGPRA has been the difficulty of communication and lack of receptiveness to dialogue between

the federal government and tribal governments. In last year’s NAGPRA report by the General Accountability Office (“GAO”), tribes complained

that agencies often limited tribal input to general public meetings rather than one-on-one consultations and consulted tribes far too late in

project development stages, limiting opportunities for tribes to influence project designs. As a result of this disregard for tribal participation,

sixty-two percent of surveyed tribes felt that federal agencies did not give sufficient consideration to tribal interests. Furthermore, when

tribes believed that federal officials did not adhere to consultation requirements, tribal government officials were left with few appeal options

other than costly litigation.

Fortunately, courts have increasingly sided with tribes in such disputes. For instance, the United States District Court for the District of Nevada

held in 2006 that a Bureau of Land Management (“BLM”) determination that ancient skeletal remains found in a cave next to tribal land were

not affiliated with any modern day Indigenous tribe was arbitrary and capricious. In that case, the BLM did not permit tribes to present their

own evidence for cultural affiliation, making the agency determination solely off its own experts. The court’s ruling thus ensures that BLM

determinations on belonging affiliations and NAGPRA obligations must give due consideration to tribal scientific and cultural evidence.

While relying on the courts can bring about favorable resolutions in some cases, the burdens of expensive litigation make it an unfavorable

method of protecting tribal interests under NAGPRA. Additionally, even with court orders protecting tribal interests, agencies report difficulty

in contacting tribal governments when they do wish to solicit their input. Sixty-seven percent of relevant federal agencies surveyed reported

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difficulty maintaining channels of communication with tribal governments and officials due to high turnover in tribal leadership. Thus,

communication between tribes and federal agencies remains a two-way street that demands bilateral solutions.

Statutory Ambiguity

A second major challenge can be found in NAGPRA’s language, which can create difficulty in separating sacred and secular objects. The

statute defines cultural items into the broad categories of human remains, associated funerary objects, unassociated funerary objects, sacred

objects, and cultural patrimony. When it comes to objects of uncertain religious or cultural connection such as projectile points, tools, or

loose beads, there is uncertainty as to whether such objects fall under the purview of the elastic definitions of NAGPRA. Tribes are often

uncomfortable with presenting lists of sacred objects to federal authorities because such lists would violate religious rules against revealing

secret information to outsiders. As a result, the definitions presented can often be both too restrictive and too broad depending on how

anthropologists, scientists, and officials decide to interpret them.

The International Loophole

A third challenge involves the international loophole. Currently, NAGPRA applies only domestically, and thus any belongings exported for sale

in foreign countries carry with them no obligations for repatriation. As a result, Native American tribes rely entirely on gestures of good faith

by foreign governments for the safe return of their cultural patrimony. One illustrative example from 2016 involved an Acoma Pueblo shield

from New Mexico which was offered for sale at the EVE auction house in Paris. An enrolled member of the Pueblo of Acoma was able to

identify the shield in a photograph as the exact one used by her grandfather, who was the original caretaker of the ceremonial shield. When

Acoma Pueblo Governor Brian Vallo contacted the auction house to privately request the shield’s return, the auction house instead invited the

Pueblo to bid on the shield themselves at the starting price of $40,000. It was only after a civil complaint, FBI investigation, and agreement

by the consignor of the shield that the belonging was returned to the leaders of the Acoma Pueblo.

To help close the international loophole, a bill was introduced in the Senate in July 2019 called the Safeguard Tribal Objects of Patrimony

(“STOP”) Act. The bill prohibits the exportation of illegally-obtained Native American cultural belongings and arranges for their voluntary or

involuntary return as enforced by criminal penalties. Despite its broad support by a coalition of tribal organizations, the statute is not without its

detractors. Some antiques dealers groups such as the Authentic Tribal Art Dealers Association (“ATADA”) fear that the STOP Act overreaches

as “the first time in the United States’ entire history that it has sought to restrict export of art or cultural heritage,” and that the STOP Act’s

broad definitions would improperly block the legal Native items trade. In December of 2020, the Senate quickly passed the legislation and

passed it along to the House where it is currently held at the desk awaiting further debate. While it is unclear if the ramifications of the STOP

Act’s language would indeed hobble the legal indigenous belongings trade, it remains evident that the international loophole is a major

vulnerability to Native American tribes’ ability to recover their cultural patrimony on their own terms.

Ethical Concerns

A fourth concern with the current status of NAGPRA is its failure to address certain key ethical issues. To begin, the language of federal

legislation aimed at protecting Native American culture is phrased in terms of property rights. While this framing is seemingly innocuous or

necessary, tribes have taken great issue with the perception of ancestral human remains and funerary objects being defined as “property.”

Indeed, where many tribes hold a spiritual reverence for the remains of their ancestors, the classification of such remains as property

seems to miss the heart of the issue – that these belongings are not property at all, but a fundamental, inalienable part of personal and tribal

identity.

The cultural reverence for remains raises another ethical dilemma involving the identification process and scientific study. Many Native

Americans find outsiders handling cultural belongings and human remains to be an odious and disturbing process. As objects undergoing

NAGPRA identification must be handled to some degree, disagreements between tribal officials and scientists over procedure can stall the

repatriation process. Additionally, the current language of NAGPRA does not stop scientific tampering with remains since scientific testing,

considered as desecration to many tribes, is still permitted prior to repatriation. Where NAGPRA categorizes tribal remains as property and

allows scientific study prior to transfer, an open question remains as to whether tribes should thus have a proprietary interest in any scientific

or anthropological data collected from tribal remains and items.

Building a Better NAGPRA

As institutions begin to move towards greater identification of ancient belongings and improved social attitudes towards the repatriation of

Native American belongings, NAGPRA will have greater opportunities to find its footing. However, such positive trends should not be

indicators of satisfaction, but rather impetus for improvement. Several key reforms in NAGPRA enforcement can be found in the

aforementioned GAO report on NAGPRA compliance. To improve communication between tribal governments and federal agencies, the

2020 report first recommended the development of a broad federal database for tribal points of contact with notification systems.

[29]

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[31]

[32]

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Additionally, as sixteen agencies currently do not require formal written communication of policies or decisions with tribal governments,

NAGPRA should require federal officials to retain written records on how they conduct tribal government consultations and should send

formal written communications to tribal governments explaining how they rendered decisions on cultural belonging affiliations. Finally, the

GAO report explained that agency capacity limitations could be addressed by providing more training for officials facilitated by tribal

governments, such as the Army Corp of Engineers’ multi-day training hosted by a Tribal Historic Preservation Office to boost cultural

competency. By building stronger channels of communication and proactively involving tribes in all stages of the training and development

process, federal agencies can help NAGPRA fulfill the mission it set out to achieve over thirty years ago, ensuring that Indigenous Nations can

better protect their sacred patrimony and preserve their legacies.

The History Endures Today…

“In the 1900s, we uncovered the history of how much looting and vandalizing occurred. We’re still suffering the consequences of

the first contact of non-natives to America, and the history endures today. This is only to mend the wounds they created here and

do so with the best processes we can in putting remains back where they belong.”

Hopi Tribal Council Vice Chairman Clark Tenakhongva

The repatriation of cultural belongings always raises a tension between the value of public education or display of sacred objects balanced

against the importance of their rightful return. Aside from the moral obligation to help correct centuries of shameful wrongs perpetrated

against Native Americans, there is the added bonus that creating working relationships with tribes opens the doors for museums to curate

more authentic and creative exhibitions. For example, in the 1970s, the Denver Art Museum originally resisted a return request by the Pueblo

of Zuni tribe for two wooden statues called War Gods. The Zuni objected to the display of the revered objects in the museum because War

Gods were living beings, and “part of living is naturally degrading…[if] put behind glass…they’d suffocate.” After working with the Zuni, the

Denver Art Museum forged a compromise and agreed to build a shrine in New Mexico for the War Gods, protected by steel barriers, barbed

wire, and alarms, but featuring an open top allowing for full exposure to the elements. With the arrival of NAGPRA in the 1990s, museums

may have lost some power to control their cultural resources, but they also gained extensive knowledge about those belongings by working

with descendant communities and local tribes and opened new possibilities for culturally-accurate display. Though there is still much room

for improvement, especially in the need to provide greater power to tribal governments, legislation like NAGPRA rightfully sets a goal of

ensuring that, indigenous history can endure today in its most authentic form.

Further Reading:

William J. Cook, Preserving Native Places, Natl. Trust for Historic Preservation (last accessed July 29, 2020).

Gabriella Angeleti, FBI Launches Campaign to Return Haul of Native and South American Works, Art Newspaper (Apr. 10, 2019).

Nanette Asimov, UC Berkeley Struggles with How to Return Native American Remains, S.F. Chronicle (Sep. 30, 2018).

Endnotes:

1. See McGirt v. Oklahoma, 140 S. Ct. 2452 (2020). ↑

2. See e.g. Craig LeMoult, Activists Demonstrate In Support Of Bills That Would Prohibit Native American Mascots, Change State Flag,

WGBH News (July 16, 2020); David Detmold, Governor Baker Signs the Bill Establishing a Special Commission to Change the Mass Flag

and Seal, ChangeTheMaFlag (Jan. 12, 2021). ↑

3. Naomi Riley, Native American Exhibitions, Wall Street J. (Mar. 10, 2017). ↑

4. See generally Lyng v. Indian Cemetery Protective Ass’n, 485 U.S. 439 (1988). ↑

5. Marilyn Phelan, A History and Analysis of Laws Protecting Native American Cultures, 45 Tulsa L. Rev. 45 (2013). ↑

6. 25 U.S.C. 32 §§ 3001–3013 (2012). ↑

7. See generally id. ↑

8. National Parks Service, Compliance, U.S. Dep’t of Interior (last updated Jan 21, 2021). ↑

9. Luis Acosta, Protection of Indigenous Heritage: Comparative Summary, Library of Congress (Mar. 2019). ↑

10. 16 U.S.C. §§ 470aa–470mm (2012). ↑

11. Acosta, supra note 9. ↑

12. Id. ↑

13. See id. ↑

14. See Rebecca Tsosie, Indigenous Rights and Archeology, in Native Americans and Archaeologists: Stepping Stones to Common Ground 71

(Nina Swidler, et al. eds., 1997). ↑

15. See United States v. Kramer, 168 F.3d 1196, 1201-02 (10th Cir. 1999). ↑

[47]

[48]

[49]

[50]

[51]

[52]

[53]

16. See Acosta, supra note 9. ↑

17. Douglas Preston, The Kennewick Man Finally Freed to Share His Secrets, Smithsonian Mag. (Sept. 2014). ↑

18. Kate Gibbon, A Primer: NAGPRA, ARPA, and the Antiquities Act, Cultural Prop. News (Dec. 19, 2018). ↑

19. See id. ↑

20. Bonnichsen v. United States, 367 F.3d 864, 867 (9th Cir. 2004). ↑

21. See Gibbon, supra note 18. ↑

22. Id. ↑

23. Kevin Simpson, To Right Historic Wrongs, Colorado Museums Embraced Spirit of a Law that Repatriated Native American Artifacts and

Remains — Largely by Listening, Colorado Sun (Mar. 1, 2019). ↑

24. See Anna Maria Ortiz, Testimony before the Subcommittee for Indigenous Peoples of the United States, Committee on Natural Resources,

House of Representatives, GAO-20-466T (Feb. 26, 2020). ↑

25. Id. at 9. ↑

26. See id at 10. ↑

27. See generally Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe v. United States, 455 F.Supp.2d 1207 (D. Nev. 2006). ↑

28. See generally id. ↑

29. Ortiz, supra note 24, at 10. ↑

30. 25 U.S.C. 32 §§ 3001 (2012). ↑

31. Gibbon, supra note 18. ↑

32. Id. ↑

33. Kevin Simpson, More than a Century Ago, a European Visitor Took More than 600 Native American Remains and Artifacts from Colorado’s

Mesa Verde, Colorado Sun (Oct. 10, 2019). ↑

34. See id. ↑

35. Ellie Duke, A Native American Shield Highlights a Legal Loophole About the Export of Cultural Artifacts, Hyperallergic (Nov. 25, 2019). ↑

36. U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Mexico Announces Successful Recovery of Acoma Shield for People of Acoma Pueblo, U.S.

Atty’s Office D. N.M. (Nov. 18, 2019). ↑

37. Rick Nathanson, Sacred Ceremonial Shield to be Returned to the Pueblo of Acoma, Albuquerque J. (Nov. 18, 2019). ↑

38. See U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Mexico, supra note 36. ↑

39. Safeguard Tribal Objects of Patrimony Act of 2020, S.2165, 116th Cong. (2020). ↑

40. Greg Smith, Stopping The STOP Act: ATADA Says Tribal Artifact Export Restriction Bill Needs Major Revisions, A No-Go, Antiques & the

Arts Weekly (Aug. 11, 2020). ↑

41. Safeguard Tribal Objects of Patrimony Act of 2020, S.2165, 116th Cong. (2020). ↑

42. See Tsosie, supra note 14, at 66. ↑

43. See Daniel K. Inouye, Repatriation: Forging New Relationships, 24 Ariz. St. L.J. 1 (1992). ↑

44. See Office of the President, Policies and Practices Regarding Treatment of Native American Remains and Artifacts, University of CA, 4

(Sept 27, 2018). ↑

45. See Tsosie, supra note 14, at 71. ↑

46. See Ortiz, supra note 24, at 11. ↑

47. Id. ↑

48. Id. at 12. ↑

49. Simpson, supra note 33. ↑

50. See id. ↑

51. Id. ↑

52. William L. Merrill, et al., The Return of Ahayu: da: Lessons for Repatriation from Zuni Pueblo and the Smithsonian Institution, 34 Current

Anthropology 523 (Dec. 1993). ↑

53. See Simpson, supra note 33. ↑

About the Author: Christopher Zheng is a rising third-year student at Harvard Law School and was a summer 2020 legal intern at the Center

for Art Law. He graduated summa cum laude from Columbia University in 2019 with a B.A. in art history and political science. At Harvard, he

serves as the co-president of the Recording Artists Project, the executive editor of online content for the Journal on Sports and Entertainment

Law, and the vice president of fashion and fine arts programming for the Committee on Sports and Entertainment Law. You can reach him at

[email protected].

Disclaimer: This article is for educational purposes only and do not constitute legal advice. Views expressed are those of the Author.

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F rom the mouth of a cave high in the Andes, Kurt Rademaker surveys the plateau below. At an altitude of 4,500 metres, there are no trees in sight, just beige soil dotted with

tufts of dry grass, green cushion plants and a few clusters of vicuñas and other camel rela- tives grazing near a stream.

The landscape looks bleak, but Rademaker views it through the eyes of the people who built a fire in the rock shelter, named Cuncaicha, about 12,400 years ago. These hunter-gatherers were some of the earliest known residents of South America and they chose to live at this extreme altitude — higher than any Ice Age encampment found thus far in the New World. Despite the thin air and sub-freezing night-time temperatures, this plain would have seemed a hospitable neighbourhood to those people, says Rademaker, an archaeologist at the University of Maine in Orono.

“The basin has fresh water, camelids, stone for toolmaking, combustible fuel for fires and rock shelters for living in,” he says. “Basically, everything you need to live is here. This is one of the richest basins I’ve seen, and it probably was then, too.”

Rademaker is one of a growing number of young archaeologists investigating how

hunter-gatherers first colonized South America at the close of the Pleistocene epoch, when the last Ice Age was waning. Casting aside old dog- mas, these researchers are finding that people arrived significantly earlier than previously believed, and adapted rapidly to environments from the arid western coastline to the Amazon jungle and the frosty heights of the Andes.

By teaming up with geologists, climate scientists and other researchers, archaeolo- gists are gaining a clearer picture of what the ancient environments were like and how peo- ple migrated across the landscape — clues that are leading them to other ancient occupation sites.

H I D D E N A N C E S T R Y “The archaeology that’s being done in South America is becoming more scientific with the development of new methodologies, and there’s a level of collegiality developing among younger researchers,” says Rademaker. “We’re all really excited about the new develop- ments that are coming faster and faster.” But researchers are racing against time as South American countries rapidly expand mining, road building and other activities that threaten to obliterate evidence from promising sites.

For decades, a fractious attitude prevailed over research on the earliest people in the Americas. One of the most acrimonious disputes concerned a site in southern Chile called Monte Verde, which Tom Dillehay, an anthropologist now at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, excavated in the 1970s and 1980s. He found evidence of human occu- pation1 that he dated to about 14,500 years ago. Dillehay’s conclusions regarding Monte Verde put him in direct conflict with the accepted wisdom among leading archaeologists that people from Siberia did not spread across North America and venture south before around 13,000 years ago. That is the age of the Clovis culture, a group of big-game hunt- ers who used distinctive spear points that are found littered across the United States. The Clovis people were thought to be the pioneers in North America, and many archaeologists there dismissed Dillehay’s claim that Monte Verde was older.

But antagonism has faded over the past six years, as convincing evidence of pre-Clovis sites has emerged in North America (see Nature 485, 30–32; 2012). Meanwhile, South American archaeologists, who were never as sceptical as their northern colleagues, have

E X T R E M E L I V I N G After humans arrived in South America, they quickly spread into some of its most remote corners.

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found more sites dated between 14,000 and 12,000 years ago, indicating that hunter- gatherers had spread through South America before and during the rise of the Clovis culture in the north.

Now that researchers have moved beyond that debate, they are making greater headway in studying when people reached South Amer- ica and what they did when they got there.

Rademaker’s finds in the Andes are helping to answer those questions — and pose new ones. His journey began 150 kilometres away from the Andes cave, on Peru’s arid coast at Quebrada Jaguay, where Daniel Sandweiss, an anthropologist at the University of Maine and Rademaker’s graduate adviser, was excavating a site that dated to the end of the last Ice Age, between 13,000 and 11,000 years ago. Sand- weiss had uncovered the remains of seafood

meals, as well as flakes of obsidian produced as people chipped at the glassy mineral to make stone tools2. There are no obsidian deposits along that coastline, so the mat erial must have come from formations high in the Andes.

Rademaker travelled into the mountains and found a large outcrop of the obsidian known as Alca3 at Mount Condorsayana in 2004. Over the next three years, he studied the obsidian deposits and evidence of past glacia- tion in the area with geologist Gordon Bromley of the University of Maine.

Those field trips gave Rademaker his first glimpse of the Pucuncho Basin, an alpine wet- land with a stream, numerous vicuñas, llamas and alpacas, and a ready supply of cushion plants, which the researchers discovered are rich in resin and can burn easily. The basin was also littered with points and shards left by early toolmakers. Hiking down the stream, he glanced up the hill to his left and saw a yawning gap — the Cuncaicha rock shelter, which he began excavating in 2007.

“This is the first time we’ve found a site this old in the high Andes,” Rademaker says. On a day in August, he wraps a bandana over his mouth and nose and shovels dirt into buck- ets to fill in an excavation pit that is no longer needed. As he works, his shirt sleeve pulls up, revealing a glimpse of meticulously detailed hominin skulls tattooed up his right arm — from Australopithecus afarensis near his wrist to Homo sapiens on his shoulder. This late in the field season, his field trousers are frayed and he has had to bind his left hiking boot with several strata of duct tape.

A chilly breeze whips across the Pucuncho plateau as some of Rademaker’s companions struggle with the thin air. As well as caution- ing his team members to prepare for the cold, Rademaker ensures that they acclimate gradu- ally to the lack of oxygen.

Even while battling the extremes, the team has gathered evidence contradicting the con- ventional wisdom that the mountains were too high, cold and inhospitable for early human habitation. Bromley’s data show that at the end of the last Ice Age, glaciers were mainly

confined to some alpine valleys, and Pucuncho and other areas were not glaciated. Palaeo- climate data indicate that the environment was probably wetter then, so there might have been more plants and animals available for the early residents, says Rademaker.

“These Palaeo-Indians were able to live in one of the most extreme environments on Earth, at the end of an ice age, and they seem to have done so quite successfully,” he says. “This tells us that Palaeo-Indians were capable of liv- ing just about anywhere.”

There are large numbers of animal bones, mainly from deer and vicuñas, in the earli- est layers of sediment in the Cuncaicha rock shelter, showing that the inhabitants found abundant game on the plateau. And some of the tools were made of stone not available in the area, indicating that residents of the cave either travelled outside the region or exchanged materials with other groups that did. Some tools show traces of plant starch, which the researchers hope to analyse to work out what the cave-dwellers ate, and whether they domesticated tubers or other plants.

The researchers have also found a frag- ment from a human skull at the site. It has not yielded DNA and its age is uncertain, but it hints that the cave could contain early human remains, says Rademaker.

T O O L T R A D E Farther south, César Méndez has followed similar clues in his search for late-Pleistocene sites along the Chilean coast. Beginning in 2004, Méndez, an anthropologist at the Uni- versity of Chile in Santiago, and his colleagues excavated an ancient encampment, which they dated to around 13,000 years ago4.

Some of the stone tools at the site, called Quebrada Santa Julia, were made of translucent quartz that is not found in coastal deposits. Like Rademaker, Méndez mapped potential paths towards known quartz deposits inland. Sam- pling along those routes, his team found an out- crop of translucent quartz at a site where people had lived and quarried between 12,600 and 11,400 years ago. The similarity with Quebrada Santa Julia in terms of age and tool-making

“These Palaeo-Indians were able to live in one of the most extreme environments on Earth, at the end of an ice age, and they seem to have done so quite successfully.”

Above: Christopher Miller (left) and Rademaker survey sites in the Pucuncho Basin in August. Left: Kurt Rademaker explores the Cuncaicha rock shelter in the Andes.

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techniques suggests that the coastal tools came from these mountain outcrops.

“What we’re seeing is that 12,000 years ago or more, these groups already had networks, knew the landscape and moved between the coast and the interior,” says Méndez.

Sites such as Quebrada Jaguay and Quebrada Santa Julia suggest that some early hunter- gatherers in South America might have trav- elled along the coast, taking advantage of the fish, shellfish, animals and plants found in wet- lands and near river deltas, says Dillehay. He is finding more evidence beneath Huaca Prieta, a 32-metre-high mound on the coast of northern Peru (see ‘Conquering a continent’).

The mound was first excavated in the 1940s, but Dillehay dug deeper and uncovered traces of Ice Age settlements in 2010. Radiocarbon dating indicates5 that humans had lived there as much as 14,200 years ago, when the area was surrounded by wetlands.

C O A S T A L D R I F T If early people did migrate along the coast, some of the best evidence has probably been swallowed up by the ocean. At the end of the Pleistocene, melting ice sheets caused sea levels to rise by 70 metres, which would have flooded much of the former coastline. That effect would have been greatest in some regions of eastern South America, where the land is rela- tively flat and the ocean migrated well inland.

At the border between Uruguay and Argen- tina, for example, archaeologists suspect that ancient people might have hunted and camped on a broad delta that formerly existed at the mouth of the Uruguay River. But any such sites would have been drowned when the sea advanced by more than 120 kilometres, says Rafael Suárez, an archaeologist at the Univer- sity of the Republic in Montevideo.

Suárez has looked for clues upriver, and has dated several residential sites to between 12,900 and 10,200 years ago. Some tools found at a site called Pay Paso are made of translucent agate, which apparently came from quarries near the border with Brazil about 150 kilo- metres away. And other tools from Uruguay have been found 500 kilometres to the south in Argentina’s Buenos Aires province6, says Nora Flegenheimer, an archaeologist with the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) in Necochea, Argentina. Such finds point to widespread trade or travel routes in eastern South America.

Some archaeologists wonder whether early residents of the continent might even have crossed the Andes. Bolivian archaeologist José Capriles of the University of Tarapacá in Arica, Chile, has raised that possibility after studying 12,800-year-old artefacts at Cueva Bautista, a rock shelter 3,930 metres above sea level in southwestern Bolivia. He notes that a similarly aged site exists at the same latitude in Chile on the western slope of the Andes. Future research could explore tools found at both sites to see

whether people migrated from one side to the other or established trading routes.

But some of the best evidence for Pleisto- cene humans in South America may disappear soon, owing to rapid expansion in industrial- scale agriculture, road building and other forms of development. Those human threats come on top of the natural ones — wind erosion and changing watercourses — that constantly alter landscapes.

Suárez and his team had to call the navy to evacuate them from a site in Uruguay last December, when floodwaters rose dangerously in the lake behind a nearby hydroelectric dam. A proposed dam could also flood sites in the Ocoña River valley in Peru, which Rademaker thinks could have been an early route from the coast to the Andes.

In the highlands, the rapid expansion of mining can be both a bane and a blessing. Archaeologists discovered Bolivia’s Cueva Bautista site during a survey for a road leading to a mine. But open-pit mines threaten many other sites, says Capriles.

Archaeological surveys must be carried out before development and infrastructure projects can go ahead, but the people who perform such studies do not always recognize the subtle signs of ancient human occupation, the researchers say. And even if the surveys do turn up important archaeological evidence, developing countries are often reluctant to let the past stand in the way of the future.

“I’ve never seen such destruction as you get in Peru,” says Dillehay. He has witnessed bull- dozers ravage sites and landowners destroy evidence to avoid delaying construction work.

There are no signs yet of such activity reaching Rademaker’s survey site in the high Peruvian Andes. Over the past decade, he and his colleagues have extensively explored

the region on foot in an effort to determine whether the inhabitants of the Cuncaicha rock shelter traded for their exotic tools and whether they lived there year-round. The answers may lie in undiscovered occupation sites between the cave and the coast, so Rademaker is explor- ing likely avenues, mapping the routes that would have required the least energy expendi- ture while providing access to water and food.

The researchers have backpacked along doz- ens of streams and rivers, sometimes clamber- ing up steep cliffs to avoid flash floods, always with an eye out for gashes in the rock face that signal a potential shelter. Early inhabitants prob- ably would have explored the new landscape in the same way with the same targets in mind.

Rademaker surveyed four rock shelters this year but all of them were inhabited too recently — only 4,000 to 6,000 years ago. Still, he is con- vinced that there are more late-Pleistocene sites in the Andes. Early inhabitants must have found other places like the Pucuncho Basin and the Cuncaicha rock shelter. They might have followed rivers that flow from the high- lands to the coast. Or perhaps they trailed the herds of wild guanacos that still descend along spurs of the Andes nearly to the ocean shore.

Each field season dangles more possibilities before Rademaker’s team. “I went for a walk one night, found another confluence and found another cave,” he says. “It’s never-ending.” ■

Barbara Fraser is a writer in Lima, Peru. 1. Dillehay, T. D. et al. Science 320, 784–786 (2008). 2. Sandweiss, D. H. et al. Science 281, 1830–1832

(1998). 3. Rademaker, K. et al. Geology 41, 779–782 (2013). 4. Méndez, C., Jackson, D., Seguel, R. & Nuevo

Delaunay, A. Curr. Res. Pleistocene 27, 19–21 (2010).

5. Dillehay. T. D. et al. Quat. Res. 77, 418–423 (2012). 6. Flegenheimer, N., Bayón, C., Valente, M., Baeza, J. &

Femenías, J. Quat. Int. 109–110, 49–64 (2003).

Studies of Ice Age occupation sites ( ) in South America reveal how human pioneers mastered many environments.

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Pay Paso Quebrada

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Huaca Prieta

Quebrada Jaguay

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AGATE QUARRIES Agate mined here was found at Pay Paso in western Uruguay.

CUEVA BAUTISTA Studies of sites in Bolivia and Chile might provide evidence of people crossing the Andes

CUNCAICHA CAVE Early people lived in this Andean rock shelter, located at 4,500 metres near obsidian deposits used for making tools.

Quebrada Maní

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Excavation of Mexican site reveals decapitation of conquistadors

Mark Stevenson The Associated Press Published Friday, October 9, 2015 1:42AM EDT

Students stand on a temple at the Zultepec-Tecoaque archeological site in Tlaxcala state, Mexico Thursday, Oct. 8, 2015. (AP / Rebecca Blackwell)

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MEXICO CITY — Excavations at the site of one of the Spanish conquistadors'

worst defeats in Mexico are yielding new evidence about what happened when

the two cultures clashed — and a native people, at least temporarily, was in

control.

Faced with strange invaders accompanied by unknown animal species, the

inhabitants of an Aztec-allied town just east of Mexico City reacted with apparent

amazement when they captured a convoy of about 15 Spaniards, 45 foot soldiers

who included Cubans of African and Indian descent, women and 350 Indian

allies of the Spaniards, including Mayas and other groups.

According to artifacts found at the Zultepec-Tecoaque ruin site, the inhabitants of

the town known as Texcocanos or Acolhuas carved clay figurines of the

unfamiliar races with their strange features, or forced the captives to carve them.

They then symbolically "decapitated" the figurines.

"We have figurines of blacks, of Europeans, that were then intentionally

decapitated," said Enrique Martinez, the government archaeologist leading this

year's round of excavations at the site, where explorations began in the 1990s.

Later, those in the convoy were apparently sacrificed and eaten.

The convoy was comprised of people sent from Cuba in a second expedition a

year after Hernan Cortes' initial landing in 1519 and was heading to the Aztec

capital with supplies and the conquerors' possessions. The ethnicity and gender

of those in the convoy were determined from their skull features.

Some place the number of people in the group as high as 550. Cortes had been

forced to leave the convoy on its own while trying to rescue his troops from an

uprising in what is now Mexico City.

Members of the captured convoy were held prisoner in door-less cells, where they

were fed over six months. Little by little, the town sacrificed, and apparently ate,

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the horses, men and women.

"The aim of the sacrifices … was to ask the gods for protection from the strange

interlopers," the National Institute of Anthropology and History said in a

statement.

But pigs brought by the Spaniards for food were apparently viewed with such

suspicion that they were killed whole and left uneaten. "The pigs were sacrificed

and hidden in a well, but there is no evidence that they were cooked," Martinez

said.

In contrast, the skeletons of the captured Europeans were torn apart and bore

cut marks indicating the meat was removed from the bones.

Some of the first European women to set foot in Mexico weren't treated

chivalrously. Along with the men, they were apparently kept in the walled-in

spaces for months, with food tossed in, perhaps through small windows. A find

last week indicates one woman was sacrificed in the town plaza, dismembered,

and then had the skull of a 1-year-old child, who apparently was sacrificed as well,

placed in her pelvis, for reasons that were probably symbolic and remain unclear.

While Spaniards later wrote accounts of the massacre that occurred in 1520, a

dark year for the conquistadors, archaeologists are finding things they didn't

mention.

"The interesting part is that the historical sources (mainly Spanish chroniclers)

didn't mention the presence of women in the convoy, and here we have a large

presence of women" among remains excavated so far, Martinez said.

Fifty 50 women and about 10 children are estimated to have been in the convoy,

and all were killed.

The Spaniards' goods were, on the whole, treated indifferently. A prized and

elaborate majolica plate from Europe was tossed into the wells as were the

Spaniards' jewelry and their spurs and stirrups, which were of no use to the

Indians. A horse's rib bone, however, was prized and carved into a musical

instrument.

"This seems to be even more spectacular information about an important event

of the Conquest … about which we have very little historical documentation,"

wrote University of Florida archaeologist Susan Gillespie, who was not involved in

the project. "It does add new dimensions to the acts of resistance of the

indigenous people. There is the wrong-headed notion that many of them simply

capitulated to the more superior European forces. But it is the victors who write

the histories of war."

The bloodiness of the brief chapter of dominance by the indigenous group is

sealed in the second name of the Zultepec ruin site, Tecoaque, which means "the

place where they ate them" in Nahuatl, the Aztec language.

When Cortes' soldiers returned to the town, they found that townspeople had

strung the severed heads of captured Spaniards on a wooden "skull rack" next to

those of their horses, leading some to think the Indians believed that horse and

rider were one beast.

When Cortes learned what happened to his followers, he dispatched a punitive

expedition of troops to destroy the town, setting into motion a chain of events that

actually helped preserve it.

The inhabitants tried to hide all remains of the Spaniards by tossing them in

shallow wells and abandoned the town.

"They heard that he (Cortes) was coming for them, and what they did was hide

everything. If they hadn't done that, we wouldn't have found these things,"

Martinez said.

Cortes went on to conquer the Aztec capital in 1521.

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A worker clears the area around broken pottery lying in situ at the Zultepec-Tecoaque archeological site in Tlaxcala state, Mexico, Thursday, Oct. 8, 2015. (AP / Rebecca Blackwell)

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